The Renowden Family One Name Study

including variants
RENODEN, TRENOWDEN, TRENORDEN and similar

Introduction

This one name study is being researched by myself, Rick
Parsons (GOONS #3605), in conjunction with Philip A. Renowden,
the registered Guild of One Name Studies
researcher (Registered number 1137). We would be very
interested to hear from you if you have any current or
historical connection to the family or have a general interest
in what we are doing. Maybe we can link you to unknown or
distant cousins. A lot of the material we have available is now
online and is growing daily. We
meet the Guild requirements having extracted all known Births,
Marriages and Deaths from the Civil Registration indexes, all
known Baptisms, Marriages and Burials from parish registers,
all known Wills and Monumental (Tombstone) Inscriptions. That
accounts for the raw data but we have done considerable work
linking this together into family trees and have done a certain
amount of research into particular family circumstances and
lifestyles.

Origins

References can be found to a family “de Trenode” in
Cornwall England from the C12th. Whether this is the
actual origin of the RENOWDEN family we are not sure but
certainly by the C15th the RENODEN name can be found
in Bodmin and Penwith in Cornwall. The priest in the parish of
Mylor was John RENAWDEN in 1452 and there are records of two
monks ordained about this time. The Bodmin branch ,
sometimes spelled RENORDEN, seems to die out by the end of the
C17th but the families that originated in West Penwith
continue to thrive today with a strong group around Penzance.
One branch in St. Hilary
began to experiment with the spelling of the name inventing
the TRENOWDEN variation early in the C19th. It was
about this time when the bulk of the Cornish adopted the
RENOWDEN spelling.

The great migration

In common with many families, when the mines started to
decline in the mid C19th, our family began to
disperse to other parts of the world, often where new mining
communities were springing up. The most prolific of these
resulted from a single family emigrating to South Australia
where they are still going strong under the name TRENORDEN .
Many thanks to Christine Trenorden, Judy Elliott and Barry
Wilson for their untiring work on this branch.

Philip’s branch
went to the South Wales coal fields and is still going strong
scattered about England and Wales, Australia, USA and
Switzerland. Other branches have been traced to New Zealand ,
Michigan, Arizona, Yorkshire
and possibly South Africa. The
great news is that many of these big branches, including
Mary’s and Phillip’s, have now been linked up
stemming from one family in Zennor
which is linked to another one via
his wife (Jane OSBORN) which takes us back to the end of the
C16th.

Red Herrings

We think that the RENODIN family in New York State and the
RENAUDIN family in Stoke on Trent, England are unrelated,
probably originating in France—perhaps there is a
pre-conquest link but we are not anticipating a break through
in this area.